Conservative Group With Abramoff Scandal Ties Picks Up Voter ID Issue Where ALEC Left Off

Shortly after the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) announced it was dropping voter identification laws from its agenda, another conservative group is stepping in to fill the void.

The National Center for Public Policy Research announced this week it had formed a "Voter Identification Task Force" to continue ALEC's "excellent work" in "promoting measures to enhance integrity in voting." Describing itself as a "conservative, free-market, non-profit think-tank," the group was established in 1982.

"The fact that ALEC is no longer going to be offering the services it did got us interested in doing something," National Center for Public Policy Research executive director David Almasi told TPM. "We obviously can't do everything ALEC did, but we can do something to make sure the issue doesn't go away."

"This is something that we picked up because someone else dropped it and not because anyone has come to us and said here's a check, do it. It's something that we feel strongly enough about that we're willing to do it off our regular strategic plan," Almasi said.

"We're putting the left on notice: you take out a conservative program operating in one area, we'll kick it up a notch somewhere else," Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research, said in a statement. "You will not win. We outnumber you and we outthink you, and when you kick up a fuss you inspire us to victory."

Corporate CEOs who "cower in the face of liberal boycott threats need to understand that the left never gives up," Ridenour said. "If these corporations do not reverse course and immediately grow enough of a backbone to say no when the left tells them what to do, conservatives may as well consider them part of the organized left. It doesn't matter if corporate executives have free-market sentiments hidden deep inside them if they continually surrender to the left's Trotskyite strategy of making relentless demand after demand in public."

While several conservative organizations have taken up the issue of voter identification, no national group that considered voter ID their central issue has existed since the American Center for Voting Rights disappeared back in 2007. More recently, the Tea Party group True the Vote has held a national conference to address the issue and James O'Keefe's Project Veritas has produced a number of "undercover" videos in an attempt to show why they believe voter ID laws are necessary.